Digital Earth as an integrating architecture for early warning and disaster risk governance

The Digital Earth vision presents an opportunity to significantly improve situational awareness, yet much of that potential is still to be realised. This paper asks how a federated Digital Earth architecture can connect technical capability, cartographic communication and institutional responsibility in early warning and disaster risk governance. A documented three-pass procedure maps the twelve frameworks of the 2025 ISDE Strategic Vision against operational requirements drawn from cartographic research, interoperability theory and disaster governance practice. The resulting architecture has eight functions. Seven carry evidence from observation and sensing through to decision and coordinated action, with progressive cartography serving as the two-way interface between evidence and those who must act. The eighth, covering provenance, ethics and governance, applies across all the others. The principal contribution is a specification of what each handover between functions must preserve, including temporal validity and decision provenance. Six evaluation criteria and three priority settings make the proposal testable, and a conditional roadmap to 2045 links each phase to defined outputs and review gates. The synthesis does not validate the architecture. Framework mapping is interpretive, and stakeholder co-design and operational evaluation remain necessary. Federation is warranted only where distributed authority justifies its coordination costs.